Can't Talk; Hyping Part I: First on the Scene, to What End?

“Get ready to get sick of hearing about this band”—it would be difficult to think of a more apt motto for indie rock in the age of the Internet.

So writes Bill Wasik in his terrific article “Hype Machine,” part of the Oxford American’s annual music issue (via Catbirdseat). Today, between the non-event that was Arcade Fire’s boring video for a boring song on a boring website and the über-event that is Radiohead’s new album, I thought I’d use Wasik’s article as a jumping-off point to get into some of the issues touched on in the Rock Critics Roundtable I mentioned last week.

Wasik’s article is really about the band Annuals, but he charts the last year or two of their career as a case study in what it means to be an indie rock band in the age of mp3 blogs and Pitchfork. He begins with “the Pitchfork effect”:

Once Pitchfork blesses an act, any mention of that act on other blogs needs to be accompanied by an acknowledgment that one has lagged terribly behind the times. On September 7, Stereogum.com not only quoted Pitchfork’s review [which ran on July 18] but wrote, “The hype machine”—by which they presumably meant blogs like themselves, because not a single dollar had yet gone into promoting the new band—”has been in motion for this band, so we feel sorta silly calling them a Band to Watch (we know, we know...you blogged about them first.)” Even so, the first comment, just fifteen minutes after the post, began with one word in all caps: “DUH.” By September 18, Idolator… could pull back for a world-weary dissection of the new band as phenomenon, complete with “Odds of Backlash,” which it placed at five-to-one. On October 5, when Rolling Stone magazine’s “Rock & Roll Daily” blog finally weighed in, with an unctuous pronouncement of phony hipness—”Trust us on this one: you guys are gonna seriously sweat us for introducing you” to this band—commenter “nick” unloaded with justifiably righteous scorn:

yeah...everyone is really gonna “sweat you” for being (LITERALLY) the last blog on the Internet to write baout (sic) these guys.

Wasik, in effect, draws a line between Pitchfork and the rest of the indie music blog world. Though as he indicates, the lag time between a mention on Pitchfork and the rest of the blogs is practically nil—assuming Pitchfork is even first, which it often isn’t. It’s hard to pinpoint how “the Pitchfork effect” is at all different from the rest. But in the Rock Critics Roundtable, Idolator’s Maura Johnston asserts that there is, indeed, a way to measure the effect:

I see SoundScan numbers every week, and while you could argue that some bands’ promotional pushes might be helped by their being mentioned on music blogs, the music blog world does not at all have the impact that Pitchfork has at this point.

I’d be curious to hear from Johnston how she is able to differentiate. Assuming that’s the case, though, it makes the existence of most mp3 blogs—those that seem to be regurgitating press releases and offering little critical content—somewhat mystifying. mp3 blogs’ greatest function, of course, is to turn us onto something we otherwise wouldn’t have heard before. But on the other hand it seems that there are less and less mp3 bloggers out there who are purely concerned with sharing their personal discoveries (and hopefully articulating what they like), and more and more who have become a conduit for press releases. As David Moore said in the Roundtable, “The ‘professionalization’ of the blogosphere toward what amounts to a big network of cable news tickers is disheartening.”

The blogosphere is typically portrayed as a cacophony of amateurs, taking consumerism into their own, unmediated hands. It’s supposedly got major labels, record stores, and print publications all wringing their hands. But have bloggers begun believing their own hype? Where once bloggers had to do their own digging, out of simple love for music, labels have now begun coming straight to them when they want to give a promotional push. This provides a kind of false validation of mp3 blogs, as if they are no longer amateur fans but rather part of some industry. Actually, they’re just being manipulated into setting a pre-planned agenda. Johnston, again:

The concept of the “promo MP3”—the MP3 that is sent to MP3 bloggers and is legal to post for “hey this record is coming out” purposes—serves to focus bloggers’ energies/bring the blog world more in line with other marketing efforts. This has resulted in the charts on elbo.ws and the Hype Machine top 10 being generally populated by a crowd of usual suspects—right now it’s Iron & Wine and Animal Collective, for example. There hasn’t been a band that’s been “broken” by blogs in a long while, and I’d argue that the efforts by labels and promotional companies to work with bloggers/make sure that they aren’t distributing entire albums over the Internet piecemeal is a big reason for that.

When labels come directly to the bloggers, those bloggers start to think maybe they could, actually, compete with/enhance “the Pitchfork effect.” Where the aim, previously, was to share music, now the bloggers are more interested in setting the agenda. It is a perhaps subtle but significant difference.  Carl Wilson, in the Roundtable, offers his two cents:

MP3 blogs… turned the music-blog scene into an acquisitive feeding frenzy which spares little time for reflection and contemplation. It’s a shame, as the earliest mp3 blogs such as Said the Gramophone and Fluxblog present an entirely different model, but few are the people who have followed in their model, compared to the here’s-the-latest-leak-with-200-words-of-hype model. The earlier, more criticism-oriented bloggers lost some focus and, more so, I think, have been turned off by all that.

While I certainly see the use of discerning mp3 blogs, I would contend that that this race to be first is actually hurting the overall music environment. The last time I did a post on this subject, I compared mp3 blogs to NME; Wilson makes the same comparison when he says the North American music culture has been “Britainized” by mp3 blogs—i.e., that music trends “now follows the rapid rise-and-fall cycles that people long mocked the NME etc for causing.” Following the latest happenings in our music culture has become so breakneck that the critical conversation is all but left in the dust. As Wasik says in his article, “To be an insider today one must merely be fast.”

Later today, Part II: Check My Stats!

Comments

[Matthew]

Jesus, I have all sort of issues with the things you've said here but I am really pleased you wrote this and think it's an excellent post.

That said, absolutely everyone you are quoting as well as you yourself and the majority of labels, artists and promo chappies seem to be making one fundamental mistake when discussing mp3 blogs: they are not an entity they are an ecosystem.

I have heard people talk about what mp3 blogs 'are' and what 'they do' an awful lot and a lot of it, as with much of your stuff here, makes plenty of sense. Nevertheless it neglects the fact that there are as many mp3 blogs as there are bloggers - all individual and all doing their own thing.

As with any group of people, there are the desperate climbers scrabbling to be as cutting edge and cool and hip as they possibly can, but that's just human nature.

I have also seen a few of the 'original' bloggers recently whining about what blogging has become, how it's lost its integrity, how people are just obsessed with hits, links and stats now and I just think that's rubbish.

Some pioneers created a niche, a niche which is now well-established, and then, once it was created, a bunch of followers jumped in after them, hungry for the little bit of influence and kudos that seemed to be available in this niche.

This happens with any, absolutely any, art form or product. All of them. It is no good complaining because it has happened to yours.

There are an awful lot, and this doesn't get mentioned too often, of followers with really rather pure motives. I know many mp3 blogs less than a year old that are written with passion and commitment, written sincerely and personally, and not about generating traffic. They are about music.

So the rabid hit-merchants may be the most visible, but then, Boyzone and The Spice Girls were some of the most visible music acts of their time too, and what integrity did they possess? And did their presense devalue the quality of the really good acts around at the same time? Did it bollocks - if anything it enhanced it.

Bloggers aren't the only ones to develop an inflated sense of their own importance either. Publicity people and even bands send out reams of promotional material with the misconception that getting 'the blogs' on board will mean that they either have made it or are infinitely more likely to make it.

But again, there is no 'the blogs'. There are just individual bloggers. If you tickle the fancy of one or two you are going to get nowhere, most of the time. But if you find yourself being covered by dozens then the chances are you might have something.

That said, does that represent the blogs 'discovering' your music or is it simply a reflection of the fact that people in general are latching onto your stuff? I, and I get the impression you would agree, would say the latter. I think blogs are reactive - I don't think they 'make bands' at all.

So everyone is guilty of this, if you ask me, not just bloggers. And actually, the vast majority of music blogs I read are as humble as it gets - downright tentative about their taste, in fact. It's just that the hit-whore blogs are the shrillest, but then again, that's part of the personality that makes them hit-whores in the first place.

Sorry if all that didn't make much sense, and thanks for writing this - it was a really enjoyable read.

[Matthew]

Presense! What a fuckwit. I meant presence, obviously.

[scott pgwp]

Matthew, thanks for this comment! You make a lot of great points, most of which I agree with although they didn't get represented in all my verbosity. (Guess that would have been part V...)

I said it somewhere else--at this point I can't recall if it was on my own blog or in the comments of someone else's--but I'm not "anti-" mp3 blogs; my post wasn't meant to hate, just to ask for some reflection on the part of some blogs. The best thing is that it did seem to generate a good deal of conversation here and elsewhere (not only spurred on by me but also by Rock Critics, Idolator, Marathonpacks, Freaky Trigger, and others).

You're right about those hype blogs being the most visible because that's exactly what they're after. The best thing about this back-and-forth that's been happening in the last week now is that a lot of bloggers who are less visible (to me, at least) are piping up. I've probably discovered a good five or six quality blogs in the last seven days, which is fantastic.